Name's Jason Thibeault. I'm an IT guy, skeptic, feminist, gamer and atheist, and love OSS, science of all stripes (especially space-related stuff), and debating on-line and off. I enjoy a good bit of whargarbl now and again, and will occasionally even seek it out. I am also apparently responsible for the death of common sense on the internet. My bad.

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EVENTS

Protesters have been arrested in Grand Central Station for the grievous crime of… protesting indefinite detention without charges in a public place. What do you want to bet that they’re going to be detained indefinitely without charges?

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Dana linked a picture of a campus cop by the name of John Pike casually spraying a line of seated Occupy Wall Street protesters with pepper-spray. This video went viral. Then, like most viral things do once they reach a certain level of critical mass, it mutated. In some cases rather drastically. Here’s some pictures I’ve found around the intertubes, proving that there’s a lighter side to a violent fuckwit attacking peaceful protesters with damaging “non-violent weaponry”. Images link to the sources.[Read more…]

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Don’t mind the repeating — it’s not ritualistic chanting, it’s a technique to allow the people at the back to hear the speaker. It’s completely necessary in these protests because megaphones or speakers or other volume amplification techniques require city permits.

Heh. That last guy doesn’t know how to work this crowd-based megaphone very well, does he? Still, their stories are important and the 13-year-old girl was great. Schools shouldn’t be privatized. The more for-profit you make something, the more it benefits the rich and detriments the poor. Shoring up education benefits the country in question’s economy, though it explicitly does not benefit one particular side of the political spectrum ideologically.

Way to go, you jackbooted thugs, you fascist assholes. I hope you feel really big now. These people were trying to rescue the 24 year old two-tour Iraq War veteran you just shot in the face with a tear gas canister — fracturing his damned skull, by the way — and you have the gall to toss a flashbang at their feet. The lack of empathy is staggering. I hope the 1% is willing to bring you into their ranks, because taking orders from them and oppressing peaceful protesters in such a violent manner is simple cowardice. Cowardice that should be rewarded monetarily, because you’re part of the very 99% whose throats you’re stomping otherwise.

Every protest that fights the establishment will have casualties. I hope this guy pulls through, because he’s given his body for his country three times over. It would be beyond sad if the assholes who took his life happened to be countrymen fighting for the rich.

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I’ve been involved in a conversation with Juniper Shoemaker these past few days about the Occupy Wall Street movement, the worry that the middle class will eventually co-opt it, and that the concerns of the less-privileged will be subsumed into returning the middle class to the status quo. It’s also been a conversation largely about language, and it’s covered a good deal of territory that we’ve already been over. At the same time, I think the conversation exposes a lot of nuance that we haven’t discussed, so it’s worth continuing in a new post. I’m answering this comment primarily, but there are other bits of the conversation in the “Clue this dude in” post and it touches on something martha said as well.[Read more…]

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One of the claims by the right-wing media about the Occupy movement is that they’re vague, e.g. they don’t know what they’re fighting for. I find this meme interesting in that it attacks the Occupy movement’s strength — the fact that the issues are so widespread and so palpable that you have to be in that 1% of advantaged folks to miss the point.[Read more…]